The New International Encyclopædia/Follen, Charles Theodore Christian

FOLLEN, Charles Theodore Christian (1795-1840). A German clergyman, scholar, and reformer, brother of the preceding. He was born at Romrod, in Hesse-Darmstadt, and studied theology at Giessen, where be showed himself an ardent believer in the principles of the French Revolution. After some weeks of soldiering against Napoleon in 1814, he returned to his studies in 1818 received an appointment as university lecturer in law. His revolutionary views, however, expressed in radical songs and inflammatory addresses, drove him from Giessen to Jena, and thence to France, to Coire in Switzerland, to Basel, where he was appointed lecturer at the university, and finally, in 1824, to America. In 1825 he was appointed a teacher of German at Harvard College, and, three years later, became teacher of ecclesiastical history and ethics in the divinity school. From 1830 to 1835 he was professor of German literature at Harvard. Later on he preached in the First Unitarian Church of New York City, and in 1839 accepted a call to the pastorate of a church of the same denomination in Lexington, Mass. From the commencement of the anti-slavery movement he was an avowed abolitionist, and a warm friend and associate of Garrison. He lost his life in the burning of the steamboat Lexington on Long Island Sound January 13, 1840. His works, with a Memoir, were published at Boston in 1841.